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Lesson 2.2: Not of this World (Pt. II)
14 Plays1 month ago
Topics discussed:
- Plato as authoritarian
- Plato as moral teacher
- Spiritual practices in the ancient world
- Attention training for greater attentional autonomy
Recommended
Transcript
Plato's Authoritarian Vision
00:00:01
Speaker
One of the most important philosophers of the 20th century, Karl Popper, read Plato. He read his masterwork, The Republic. And here's what he came out with. He decided, Popper did, that Plato appears to be a fascist.
00:00:25
Speaker
that what he sees as the ideal city-state is, in effect, a police state. Now, if we are going to be careful with our words here, perhaps fascist isn't exactly the right label. Fascism means something very specific, something that manifested itself in Italy during the first half of the 20th century.
00:00:51
Speaker
Perhaps a better label for what Popper and some other scholars think of Plato is authoritarian. According to these scholars, including Popper,
00:01:05
Speaker
Plato believes that the masses should be ruled by an elite to group, and there is no such thing as freedom of speech or freedom of thought. Rather, the political elite will decide for you what the laws are, what your beliefs should be, what should be censored, who should procreate and with whom.
00:01:33
Speaker
that's ah dark and twisted alley in the Republic, a little bit of eugenics, and even what counts as the truth. There is something called the Noble Lie in Plato's Republic, where the different classes are essentially lied to, that's why it's called the Noble Lie, and told that they have precious metal within them.
00:02:01
Speaker
And the reason for this is to get them to do their duty. So we'll come back to this idea of the noble lie a little bit later. Let's just begin to dive into this by looking at some of the political philosophy in Republic.
Ideal Governance in 'The Republic'
00:02:19
Speaker
So perhaps the easiest way to think about this is by looking at Plato's rankings of the different political organizations that are possible.
00:02:30
Speaker
and he gives them to us from best to worst. So what kind of political organization is the best? According to Plato, what we really want is an aristocracy. Now here, aristocracy does not mean anything to do with blue blood or whatever ideas you might have with that. It doesn't have to do necessarily with a king that is part of a divine lineage. What Plato means by aristocracy is rule by the best.
00:03:02
Speaker
And what he means by the best are those with the most knowledge. How do we figure out who has the most knowledge? Well, Plato gives us a curriculum full of mathematics, I'm sure you're not surprised about that, that is supposed to generate for us a type of person who has access to reality at the most fundamental level.
00:03:28
Speaker
so He says this in Republic Book 7, and here's a rough sketch of that curriculum. All the children, including women, by the way, this is a very novel idea. It probably sounded crazy to other Greeks of the time period, but Plato believed that both men and women could be trained to see if they are good enough to be rulers of the state. so Beginning in childhood, men and women, we could imagine,
00:03:59
Speaker
would begin to be trained through play. That would be the first form of teaching. And it seems to be that it would be paid for by the state. So the state took the education of children very seriously, or it should take the education of children very seriously, according to Plato. When they get a little bit older, they would begin to go on sightseeing trips to battlefields.
00:04:25
Speaker
Of course, warfare will be an important part of what a ruler will eventually do. So this is why this is done. Then there is a two or three year break for gymnastics, right? Physical training, we might call that today. And those who show promise, and this is key, only those who show promise, who show a real mastery of everything that has been discussed so far, they get selected for the next stage.
00:04:55
Speaker
From age 20 to 30, they will study, not surprisingly, mathematics. Then at age 30, a second selection will take place. In other words, students who are once again showing promise, they move on to the next stage and the others, is well, they are no longer in the running to be rulers of the state.
00:05:20
Speaker
So those students who move on after the second selection turn to training and dialectic for five years. This is something like philosophical training, but it might also involve other disciplines, maybe physics, maybe biology.
00:05:36
Speaker
And then at age 35, they will have to begin to hold positions of power during battles, right? They will hold command in war, as well as other offices that are suitable for people of this age. For up to 15 years, they'll do this. So this is almost like a third selection. Let's see who does well at these lower offices.
00:06:04
Speaker
And then at age 50, this would now be the third selection, those that come out of this program, the most able, the most capable, the most knowledgeable, they will, from time to time, for the rest of their lives, be called on to rule the state.
00:06:28
Speaker
That's what Plato means by the best. Those that are the most knowledgeable after a seriously complicated program of instruction. These people, in other words, have been training for something like 50 years to become rulers of the state. So it's not any old general that won a couple of battles. It's someone who has trained for this.
00:06:54
Speaker
And according to Plato, the training in dialectic and mathematics, these will have revealed to these individuals, men or women, remember. the true nature of reality. They will have come to know the forms. And in fact, they will come to love the forms so much that they will have to be coaxed to go rule the state. you know They will get that bug for philosophy, and they will just want to think about the forms all the time. But we will have to compel them, even though they don't want to, we will have to force them to rule the state because they are the most suited to that.
00:07:35
Speaker
And that's what Plato means by aristocracy. Here is a sidebar. There is a book by the political scientist, Jason Brennan, called Against Democracy, where he essentially advocates something in the spirit of Plato, not quite to this 50-year training of future rulers, but something like, let's only let those that have displayed great political knowledge devote
00:08:06
Speaker
Now, that could get dark very quickly, but maybe at least some people, clearly he thinks so, Jason Brennan does. Maybe that would be better, right? So there is something to debate right there. Here is one way that Plato gets us thinking and arguing and philosophizing.
Plato's Hierarchy of Governments
00:08:27
Speaker
In any case, let's move on here to Plato's second best form of government.
00:08:34
Speaker
According to Plato, a democracy or rule by the military, that's the second best form of government. So a democracy sounds a little bit like democracy, but it is definitely not the same. Democracy is essentially ruled by those who are most suited for war and other martial activities. Just think about the generals who get political office after they won a major war, that's sort of the idea here. This is not ideal, as Plato insists. Of course, we would rather them be fully trained for 50 years in the art of governance
00:09:20
Speaker
But, you know, second best is, you know, those that are excellent in military matters. They haven't discovered the fundamental nature of reality yet. They haven't gone through the curriculum, perhaps. But they know how to organize very complex affairs like war, like battle.
00:09:40
Speaker
And so for that reason, they might be suited for certain organizational tasks similar to that, like you know statecraft running a city-state. The third best form of government is oligarchy, a rule by the rich. Now, these are deteriorating quite rapidly. right Plato does not think much of this, but if you had to rank them, this is third place.
00:10:11
Speaker
He does not think much of this because this is ruled by those who value money over everything else, including virtue. Now, for Plato, virtue is the end of life, basically. That's the point. In other words, you want virtue so that you can flourish. And the oligarchs, well, they clearly value money over virtue, and that's not good. Nonetheless, at least the oligarchs have some kind of north a star. They have a compass. They want more money. That's clearly it. And this is some kind of organizing principle, not a good one.
00:10:49
Speaker
but there's something there. and I mention this because the next form of government, according to Plato, is democracy. and We really can't see why Plato thinks democracy is the second worst form of government by thinking about how he defines a democracy.
00:11:10
Speaker
So at first blush, Plato says that democracy is ruled by all, but as he gets deeper into this form of government, you see that it's ruled by those who value freedom over all else. And what kind of freedom is it that they value? They value the freedom to pursue whatever desire they want.
00:11:36
Speaker
So, what we get from this is that according to Plato, democracy is ruled by those who value all desires equally. For Plato, it is very clear that there are different types of desires. The desire for money, the desire for sex, the desire for knowledge, the desire for happiness, etc.
00:12:01
Speaker
And he thinks very clearly that the desire for knowledge and the desire for happiness, those are extremely important. And the desire for other things, the base desires, money and sex, well, those are not very good. In fact, we should labor to control those kinds of desires, not let them overrun us, not be consumed by them.
00:12:28
Speaker
And the goal here, of course, is to make it so that reason, which is in line with virtue and knowledge, reason governs over all the other desires. In a democracy, Plato sees that none of that is happening. And we can see this in what Plato calls the democratic man.
00:12:48
Speaker
The Democratic man, throughout his day, essentially, changes his hierarchy of desires. In the morning, you wake up, you're pumped, and you go work out because health is the most important thing. Then you have a nice, healthy breakfast, but then by afternoon, your willpower is kind of waning, so you say, yeah what the heck, I may have a couple of cookies instead of the salad I was planning on eating.
00:13:14
Speaker
Once you've done that, you know the diet plan goes to heck and now you're having beers after work. And whereas in the morning, you were thinking that in the afternoon, after a hard day of work, you were going to, you know, practice that instrument that you've been trying to learn, right? Maybe you've been practicing the piano, but by the evening, after a couple of beers, you're thinking, instead of practicing, I'm going to just play video games all night. Or you think to yourself, I'm going to go out and try to find someone to have us a single serving of romance, if you know what I'm saying.
00:13:45
Speaker
And so basically the democratic man sometimes values learning new skills, sometimes values health, and other times doesn't value health, but values a good time over everything else. And other times he values money and other times he values politics and he jumps up and down talking about his favorite team, the blue people or the red people, and then he gets bored. And so he looks at something else instead.
00:14:13
Speaker
And so that is what a democratic person is to Plato, someone who has no hierarchy of desires, of values. And that's why it's the second worst form of government. What's the worst? Well, tyranny. Tyranny is ruled by a single tyrant.
00:14:38
Speaker
This is absolutely the worst form of government because in a sense, in a very real way, no one is happy. Of course, the tyrant is not happy because if you are the sole ruler of a state, you can never relax. You're always looking behind your shoulder.
00:14:59
Speaker
Because there's only one way to get rid of a tyrant, right? That's assassination. And so you never know who to trust. You have no friends. It's lonely at the top. And not only that, to keep your power, you have to suppress the masses. So it's not fun being at the top. And it's definitely not fun being a subject of the tyrant because whatever the tyrant says goes. And so there is no one that is free. Not even the tyrant is free.
00:15:28
Speaker
The people who are subjects of the tyrant, they are all essentially slaves to the tyrant. And the tyrant is a slave to fear. And so this is the worst possible form of government, says Plato. According to Plato, by the way, all of these forms of government come in cycles.
00:15:53
Speaker
We can begin with aristocracy, let's say, even though the rulers are about as good as you can make them. Plato says eventually it will devolve into rule by the military. Generals will slowly encroach on the you know on the rulers and they will take over. And then, democracy, because of all their wars,
00:16:16
Speaker
they will eventually be taken over by the oligarchs. you know There's a lot of money to be made in war. And so those fat cats who are looking for even more money, well, they know that if they wage war in the right places, they'll get even more money.
00:16:31
Speaker
And so the oligarchs take over from the generals. And then, because no one's happy with oligarchy, there is a democratic revolution, right? So you know instead of only money being valued, all desires are valued equally.
00:16:49
Speaker
And so the democratic people have their time. But then, of course, that only creates chaos because a state that values all things equally essentially has no direction that it's going. And so that's bad. Things go south and eventually someone is given power simply because they can restore balance and order to society.
00:17:16
Speaker
And so that, of course, is the tyrant. Those are the political cycles, according to Plato. And so, as you can see, we don't even have to reflect very much. He believes that democracy is pretty bad, really right next to the bottom, and something that is very anti-democratic, aristocracy, ruled by some small number of aristocrats, that's the best.
00:17:43
Speaker
So we can see fairly easily that this is not quite fascism, as I said earlier, but it seems to be fairly authoritarian. Everyone is supposed to stay in their lane. If you are part of the ruling class, then you rule.
00:17:59
Speaker
And if you are not part of the ruling class, well, you do whatever, you know, task or job or trade that you engage in, but you don't make any political decisions whatsoever. That's pretty authoritarian. In fact, this way of looking at Plato gives us the darkest interpretation of a very famous allegory that he gives in Republic.
Philosopher-Kings and Enlightenment
00:18:24
Speaker
You might have heard of the allegory in the cave.
00:18:28
Speaker
According to the allegory in the cave, you have to imagine a group of people who are in a cave and they are tied up in a way such that they can only see directly in front of them. Behind them, there is a fire and there's people walking around with cutouts of different things like, I don't know, a cat or a table.
00:18:52
Speaker
And all that the prisoners see are the shadows on the wall. And so what they think is a cat or a table, they just see it as a shadow. They can't tell what's behind them. In other words, what the shadow really is, is that cutout.
00:19:10
Speaker
And so the analogy here is to the forms. The real thing, the thing that's actually causing those things that we see as prisoners is, you know, in a sense, not visible. It's behind them in this analogy. And that's the real thing. And the shadow that we see is just, you know, a mere copy, a cheap copy. and But of course, one person breaks free from their bondage in this cave and they eventually crawl all the way out of the cave.
00:19:45
Speaker
And it takes a while for their eyes to adjust, but eventually they see the real thing, right? They see real cats and real tables. Ah, now we have a true understanding of the forms. It takes a long time. Sometimes you think you've gotten that knowledge, right? You think those cutouts, that's catness. That's the table.
00:20:08
Speaker
But no, there's an even higher level. And so this analogy is meant to sort of summarize for us that long period of training that someone has to undergo before they can understand reality at the most fundamental level. And this person makes it all the way out of the cave and sees reality for what it really is. As you can tell, anyone that acquires this type of knowledge is very, very special.
00:20:37
Speaker
They are unlike the masses, right, who are still stuck in their delusion, still stuck in their chains. They know the truth, these individuals that have made it out of the cave. So because they know the truth, they should rule as they see fit. Who else would you want ruling the city other than these individuals who have made it out of the cave?
00:21:05
Speaker
These, then, are the philosopher kings or queens. Let's not forget about that.
00:21:40
Speaker
This interpretation of Plato is quite common, I should say. Many political scientists seem to hold it. I think it's slightly less popular in the field of philosophy. And I'm going to go ahead and push back on this interpretation mainly for two reasons. First of all, if I left Plato as an authoritarian, then you might just shut off, right? And we still have one more way to see Plato, way number six.
00:22:11
Speaker
And so I have to kind of diffuse this authoritarian bomb I just threw at you. Secondly, though, I mean, it really is a case that there is good evidence to suggest that this take on Plato is probably not entirely accurate or, in the very least,
00:22:31
Speaker
It's underdetermined. In other words, those who think that Plato is undeniably unauthoritarian are saying more than they should be saying if they are epistemically self-aware. There is simply not enough evidence to really defend this kind of view. So let me begin my pushback here against this take of Plato and make my way towards the sixth way we'll be looking at Plato.
00:23:00
Speaker
Here's the first bit of evidence that I'll give you that this is not the right take on Plato. So I'm getting this from Julia Anas, who is a very famous philosopher and historian of the ancient world. But by the way, you can get this from multiple other philosophers. But here's what Julia Anas says.
00:23:21
Speaker
Republic is not a political work, but it's supposed to be a contribution to moral theory. In fact, if you just read the dialogue itself, Plato says this much. He says, well, let's build an ideal city so that we can see what justice looks like on a grand scale.
00:23:42
Speaker
And then from what we learn about that thought experiment, we'll figure out what justice is in ourselves, in individuals, in other words. Translation, we're trying to figure out how we should live. And it's really hard to think about this because it's kind of like a ah ah microscopic scale, right? Looking within yourself, it's really difficult. So why don't we blow things up? Why don't we look at a whole city?
00:24:10
Speaker
And maybe that'll be almost like a magnifying glass for the self. We'll treat the city as an analogy for the self and whatever works for the city will hopefully work for us as individuals. That's the whole point.
00:24:26
Speaker
And what is it that we learn? Well, ideally, we should train the rulers of the state. We should train them for a very, very long time. What does that mean for us as individuals? We should train ourselves to be able to reason very, very well over a long period of time. And once we do that, we can, through our newly developed powers of reason,
00:24:52
Speaker
govern over ourselves and dominate the passions. Just like Socrates before him, Plato is trying to get us to become the type of person where reason is king, right? Reason dominates over your emotions, over your moods, and you only engage in valued actions, those actions that you have deemed to be essential and important to you.
00:25:19
Speaker
Your desires are in check, in other words, and you don't just go with any whim at any moment. Sometimes we want to, I don't know, not work out or not do homework or take it easy at work instead of doing what we're supposed to do.
00:25:35
Speaker
But reason, says Plato, when it's in charge, will get those emotions that drive us towards that laziness and check under control and make it so that we engage in the things that we're supposed to do.
00:25:53
Speaker
So that's the whole message of Republic. And we can actually see this because the way that Plato defines the different forms of government, democracy, oligarchy, that's not even the way that the city states of Plato's day were like. If you were to go find an oligarchy in Plato's day, it wouldn't look like the way he describes it in his book.
00:26:19
Speaker
Same thing with a tyranny or a democracy, right, where there is rule by the military. The definitions that he gives of these forms of government don't line up with what we actually see in the time period, which means it's a metaphor. I mean, it's not really supposed to be taken as a political theory, but rather an analogy to help us with our moral inquiries.
00:26:44
Speaker
That's probably the best evidence I can give you that the authoritarian take of Plato is not exactly accurate.
Critique of Athenian Democracy
00:26:51
Speaker
And by the way, that was from Julia Anness's book, Platonic Ethics, Old and New. You can check that out if you're interested in this. There are a couple of other tidbits of information that I can share to make you see that it's an entirely clear that Plato was necessarily authoritarian. He might have had a little bit of anti-democratic feelings in him, but let me just give you this other little tidbit. Lots of people during the time period had an anti-democratic sentiment. I bet you that maybe even you, had you been there, would have been a little anti-democratic.
00:27:31
Speaker
And that's because the people that were living around in this time period, they saw the ex excesses of democracy, in particular during the Peloponnesian War. Now, I did allude to this before. I had mentioned that both the Spartans and the Athenians, both sides of the fight, in other words, engaged in some pretty atrocious behavior. To put it in modern language, they committed both war crimes as well as crimes against humanity.
00:28:07
Speaker
And so let me give you one of the ones that the Athenians engaged in. And when I explain this, or while I explain this, remember that the Athenians were a democracy during this time period. So all the major calls were made by the people. This has to do with the island of Melos.
00:28:28
Speaker
This island was neutral during the Peloponnesian War, although they had previously been allies of Sparta in prior wars. But at the time, the Melians were just neutral, not on either side. We would say they were not aligned. While the Athenians invaded the island and demanded that they surrender,
00:28:54
Speaker
And the millions pleaded their case and said, why should we do this? you know You have no quarrel with us. You shouldn't be doing this. And they challenged the Athenians to justify their actions. Well, we have a passage from the historian Facities that explains the conversation that took hold. And I want to read this to you.
00:29:15
Speaker
because it would have been the case that other people during the time period would have heard this and tell me if you don't get a bit of an anti-democratic feeling when you hear this. Here are the Athenians responding to the pleas of the Melians.
00:29:35
Speaker
quote For ourselves, we shall not trouble you with speech's pretenses, either of how we have a right to our empire because we overthrew the mead, the Persians, or are now attacking you because of wrong that you have done us, and make a long speech which would not be believed.
00:29:57
Speaker
Let me explain what that means. They're saying, we're not going to justify what we're doing because that justification wouldn't really mean anything. In other words, we could try to justify our empire, or why are we doing to you what we're doing? But those are just words. They're not really why we're doing any of this. And they'll explain why they're doing what they're doing. Let me continue here with a quote.
00:30:25
Speaker
And in return, we hope that you, instead of thinking to influence us by saying that you did not join the lack of demonians, in other words, the Spartans, although they're colonists, or that you have done us no wrong, will aim at what is feasible, holding in view the real sentiments of us both. So let me translate that once more. What they're saying there is that you know You can tell there's a story too, and those would just be words as well. So let's get down to the brass tacks here. That's what the Athenians are saying. We can make these speeches, but they're not going to really mean anything because all that matters is this. Since you know, and as well as we do, that right, as the world goes, is only in question between equals and power.
00:31:20
Speaker
while the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.
00:31:30
Speaker
Did you catch that? That's, in a nutshell, the phrase, might makes right. You are not our equals. We do not have to explain ourselves to you. That's the Athenians.
00:31:49
Speaker
That's the Athenian policy, I should add, the one that was democratically decided upon. And so what happened when the Athenians finally took the city of Melos? Well, they executed all the men, all of them. An entire island massacred.
00:32:17
Speaker
The historian Thucydides described it this way. Of the Melian population, the Athenians executed all the grown men who came into their hands and enslaved the children and women. Later, they colonized a place themselves, sending out 500 settlers of their own. That is a democracy gone mad.
00:32:46
Speaker
and many people who were living in that time period saw it as such. This is why we get, besides some of the writings of Plato that have an anti-democratic tone, we also get anti-democratic poems, right? The famous poets Theogonus and Pindar also had very popular poems that were pretty obviously anti-democratic.
00:33:14
Speaker
In fact, I mentioned the Agnes in the lesson on the Sophists when I was discussing Protagoras. So maybe you'll recall, the Agnes believed that only the noble know the measure of things, right? Only the rich and well-to-do have any good sense in them. You shouldn't even bother to teach it to the masses because they won't be able to learn anything. That's pretty anti-democratic.
00:33:42
Speaker
And so this sentiment was fairly widespread, at least among the intellectuals. And this is why throughout most of Plato's life, philosophers in general, throughout the 300 BCE, were seen as politically untrustworthy in Athens.
00:34:03
Speaker
The people believe that if you were a philosopher, you were necessarily sympathetic to oligarchs or tyrants, right? That you sided with, for example, Macedon. Macedon was a region to the north of Athens that was gaining power during this time period. You probably have heard of one very famous Macedonian.
00:34:27
Speaker
Alexander the Great. and Because they were a type of monarchy, many people erroneously believed that philosophers must be on their side. They must be somehow pro-monarchy. Now, of course, some philosophers were pro-monarchy.
00:34:44
Speaker
but all philosophers were painted with a very broad brush here and this might have included Plato. Now, I'm not really telling you how you should interpret Plato, but you should know this information when you're trying to figure out what Plato was all about.
00:35:00
Speaker
and Here's a quick sidebar. Yes, some people who were philosophers also ended up being associated with tyrants and with other people who were you know not exactly democratic in spirit.
00:35:16
Speaker
but You have to remember that many, many people studied philosophy and many of these people, maybe even most of these people, were very wealthy. That's the only way you can pay to study with philosophers. You had to have enough money so you can go to a school and just stay there and learn instead of making money. And so if you have a group of very wealthy, very well-networked individuals, it's not at all surprising that some of them are going to eventually, when they leave their school of choice,
00:35:54
Speaker
have ties to some political leader somewhere, some tyrant, or maybe they themselves gain political power and they are not exactly democratic. It's more so that philosophy in the time period was just associated with wealthy people and some wealthy people eventually gain political power or were in some tyrant's court or some oligarch's court.
00:36:19
Speaker
And so maybe that's why Plato is painted with this brush, the authoritarian brush.
00:36:38
Speaker
This brings us to one final take on Plato.
Plato's Moral Teachings
00:36:44
Speaker
maybe he was a moral teacher. In other words, what he was really selling is a way of life. That means that when we're looking at the dialogues, all of his dialogues, from the early ones to the later ones, the key to interpreting them correctly is to see their true function And their true function is pedagogical. He was trying to teach you something maybe even better than that. He was trying to get you to think so that you can, for yourself, discover something. There is quite a bit of evidence for this. I will give you two bits in particular before I move on to what I think is the best evidence for this.
00:37:39
Speaker
Let me begin with this. I mentioned the work of Julia Anas before, and this argument comes from her. She says there's a big incongruity between the content of the dialogues and what is being written. What does this mean? Well, I mentioned this earlier, but In Republic, Plato argues that a true philosophy would have to be mathematical and abstract. But in the book itself, Republic itself, it's full of analogies and metaphor and myth, which means that the book itself is not a true philosophy.
00:38:27
Speaker
He's literally telling you what philosophy ideally is, is abstract and mathematical. And so this dialogue, if it's doing anything, it's only trying to engage in you some interest for exploring these ideas. It's trying to teach you something in a way that is compelling. By having little dialogues, essentially little plays, he is going to spark in students an interest in the topic itself.
00:38:58
Speaker
He's not going to cram some doctrine down their head. He's trying to get them to see that this is important to think about. The classicist Robin Waterfield also sees this. He suggests that some of Plato's arguments are actually weak. Why would you include weak arguments for a view in your dialogues?
00:39:26
Speaker
Plato, we can see from his good arguments, is no dummy. So why would there be weak arguments in there? Well, sometimes teachers give weak arguments to their students so that together they can improve them. I actually do this myself and it is such a joy to with your students kind of fix up an argument and make it stronger.
00:39:55
Speaker
So again, here we have from Waterfield evidence that Plato was fundamentally a teacher. He was providing learning material, arguments that he could discuss with his students so that he can improve their dialectical skills, their capacity to philosophize. Even more telling, sometimes Plato doesn't even provide arguments for his views. He gives you a myth.
00:40:25
Speaker
Why would it give you a myth? Because myths stick with you. At the time, myth was basically the closest thing to a little short story that you'll remember and think about later on. And so by putting things in myth, Plato gave his students little earworms, little ideas that kind of stuck with them that they're thinking about before they go to bed and that preoccupy them.
00:40:55
Speaker
So those are two bits of information that show us that Plato was maybe more teacher than anything else. The best piece of evidence is probably his school, the Academy.
00:41:15
Speaker
The Academy was founded in the 380s BCE. e Historians and archaeologists in the last few decades have been inquiring deeper and deeper into how the school actually functioned. And I want to give you some of those details now so that you can really see Plato through this lens of a moral teacher.
00:41:42
Speaker
It seems that Plato never enforced a doctrine. In other words, he never forced students to believe what he believed. In fact, his nephew, Spusopus, who rejected his doctrine of the forms, he was the one that was the next leader of the Academy. This position, by the way, is called a Scholarch. And so the Scholarch of the Academy didn't necessarily have to believe what Plato believed. That wasn't what was important. What was important was the culture of intellectual freedom that existed in the Academy. We can also see this in another student of Plato, a very famous student, Aristotle.
00:42:35
Speaker
Aristotle, if you don't know, also rejected Plato's doctrine of the forms and much else that Plato said. And it seems that Aristotle was writing his arguments against Plato while still enrolled in the Academy. Because that was the point of the Academy, to engage and debate to, respectfully, we can imagine, argue for different positions. Because hopefully, through the argumentation, you can come closer to some kind of hidden truth. There is a book called Plato's Academy, where various scholars get together and describe the history and functions of the school. There is a passage that helps us to see what was going on there.
00:43:30
Speaker
And this is from chapter 12 of that book, where the author says that in the academy, there was not a unity of belief, right? There wasn't one belief system, but it was unified in a sense. There was a unity of culture. And the culture was such that there was a validity to differences in opinion. In other words, in place of rigid dogmas,
00:43:59
Speaker
there was a strong ethos of intellectual freedom.
00:44:05
Speaker
It seems then that what Plato did day in and day out is maybe he just organized the material. He thought of which disciplines would be important for his students to learn. They call him an architect of the program of study.
00:44:21
Speaker
And as we mentioned in the last lesson, he probably pushed mathematics as central, right? So there is that. But more than anything, he kind of just challenged his mathematicians. He said, you should work on this problem. And he kind of oversaw the study in that way. Always demanding the best from his students, right? Encouraging them like a good teacher would.
00:44:52
Speaker
And in so doing, Plato was teaching his students not specific doctrines, but a method, an approach, philosophy as a way of life.
00:45:34
Speaker
Before I begin discussing Plato's ethics specifically, I'm gonna talk a little bit about ethics after Plato. I sort of wanna get a a fast forwarded perspective because I think this will help you understand Plato's ethics a little bit better. Essentially, it is after Plato's lifetime that philosophy as a way of life really picked up steam And there was a proliferation of different movements, different schools of philosophy ah cropping up. Plato is sometimes seen as the starting point for this. Sometimes it is actually his teacher Socrates. It doesn't really matter where the starting point is, because the main thing here is that there is a very long trajectory.
00:46:24
Speaker
Over time, various different new characters come on the scene and they come up with a new set of practices. New ideas come from, for example, the East after the conquests of Alexander the Great. And so there is just a lot of evolution of ideas over time. So maybe the starting point doesn't matter as much.
00:46:44
Speaker
And of course, as we learned in a previous lesson, it really is a case that even with Socrates, it's not like it's ah it's a very good starting point because Socrates himself was the product of various generations of accumulated philosophical debate, as we talked about with the work of Randall Collins, the sociologist.
00:47:06
Speaker
Another thing I can say from this fast-forwarded perspective, thinking about 400 years after Plato's life, is that the practices that developed when it comes to philosophy as a way of life, they really varied between the different schools. So each school kind of had their own thing, or in the very least, they would focus on different particular philosophical practices.
00:47:33
Speaker
And these would have been known, of course, to other philosophers, even if they're not in that school, because sometimes people would switch schools, right? They would be in, let's just say, the cynic school, and maybe they would switch over to Epicureanism.
00:47:48
Speaker
And so there was a lot of cross-pollination and influencing. And it's even the case that non-philosophers were familiar with some of these practices. We actually do have evidence of different comics and playwrights poking fun at philosophers because they were, you know, weird.
00:48:07
Speaker
And so it's probably the case that other people that were not affiliated with a particular school or movement knew about these practices and thought they were just very strange and worthy of um cranking out a couple of jokes at their expense. Let's stay in this macro perspective for a moment. That way we can consider these philosophical movements from the perspective of several centuries rather than just from Plato's lifetime.
00:48:36
Speaker
And from this perspective, let's talk about some general philosophical practices. I will give you the name of them. I will spare you the Greek. And I'll give you a brief description of these. What I'll do to help you kind of get the feel of how they evolved over time is cover only one or two of them per lesson.
00:48:59
Speaker
That way you can begin to see that it's not the case that you know Plato or Socrates just sat down and wrote down these practices and said, hey, you should all do this. But they were the product of cultural evolution. These were, in other words, the product of philosophical argumentation over time.
00:49:17
Speaker
So here they are, I will discuss five general categories. The first one is attention. So what does attention mean? Effectively, it means developing attentional autonomy. So what in the world is attentional autonomy?
00:49:35
Speaker
So one way to describe what this is is to distinguish between compulsive attention and free attention. Compulsive attention is when you're paying the kind of attention that is only as powerful as the stimulus is. For example, if you're trying to read a book, but you see something in your peripheral vision, you might pay attention to that very quickly, right? It's something that grabs your attention because it's a much stronger stimulus.
00:50:06
Speaker
I mean, this is probably a good idea to do, right? If something fast is moving next to you, it might be dangerous. So, you know, pay attention to it. That kind of attention, compulsive attention, in effect, is only as strong as the stimulus is. So if nothing else is going on and the book is the most interesting thing in front of you, well, you're gonna, you know, read your book. If something stronger comes in there, then that's gonna grab your attention.
00:50:35
Speaker
But some people can train themselves to be freely attentive. In other words, you only pay attention to that which you have decided to pay attention to. And so one example of this that easily comes to mind is those that engage in you know some sort of meditation practice.
00:50:57
Speaker
If you train yourself to focus on your breathing, for example, despite what's going on around you, whether there be a plane flying overhead or some thought is trying to distract you, some people really have managed to only focus on their breath. And this, of course, requires some pretty extensive, you know, meditation, some attention training. But this is actually the sort of thing that philosophers were looking to develop.
00:51:23
Speaker
They realized that without training, you know our attention can be easily, and here's the key word, involuntarily, distracted. And so one of the things that philosophers attempted to develop is a free attention. They wanted to gain attentional autonomy. They would only focus on what they decided they would focus on, what they decided is important.
Philosophical Practices Post-Plato
00:51:49
Speaker
So attention is one category of a philosophical practice. Here is another, it's two words, but it's, you know, sort of two sides of the same coin. It's memorization and meditation. So these go together and here is how it works. You first have to internalize, you know, the dogmas or the principles of the school.
00:52:13
Speaker
So that's the memorization bit. And then you have to the word that they use is meditate. But here's another way to put it. You have to think about them a lot in order to give yourself some strength to abide by them. And then you have to meditate on how they apply to your life or how you will put them into effect.
00:52:35
Speaker
An example of this might be that you know you've decided that you're always going to be kind to people. and Let's just say that later on that day, you know that you're going to run into someone that you really don't like and you don't think much of them. and In the past, you've been mean to them.
00:52:54
Speaker
Okay, well, what memorization and meditation imply here is that first you memorize your, you know, pithy little saying, always be kind or whatever it is, right? That would be the example of the memorization technique. Always be kind, always be kind, always be kind. Okay.
00:53:11
Speaker
And then you meditate on how it is that you will abide by that principle when a challenge arises. So you actually almost sort of mentally rehearse what you will do when you run into that person.
00:53:27
Speaker
So that's memorization and meditation. Reading, of course, is a philosophical practice. That's sort of what everyone now thinks all philosophy is. So that goes all the way back to the ancient period. But in the ancient period, of course, it was much more than reading, but reading did play a part. Students of a particular school of philosophy would read the system of arguments that was you know developed in support of what their school teaches.
00:53:57
Speaker
So all these commentaries that all the different students of a school would write, you as a new student would read them and you would attempt to you know get the most important elements of it so that you can use them yourself.
00:54:12
Speaker
Another category of philosophical practice is known as research and investigation. What that means is, you know roughly speaking, putting instruction into practice. So let's continue with the earlier example about being kind to everyone and running into someone that you really don't like. Research and investigation essentially is doing experiments to see how well your work around actually worked.
00:54:42
Speaker
So let's say that you decided that you would have a script. You would only say things to this person that you don't really like, things that you had pre-approved for yourself, a little set of lines that will make sure that you you know are kind only and you don't say anything other than these lines. And so then you run into this person and lo and behold, it doesn't work.
00:55:07
Speaker
You start saying things that are not actually on the script because he was asking you questions that were not addressed in the script. And so you end up failing. He, you know, annoys you and then you're mean to that person. Well, that would be an aspect of research and investigation. You tried to put your instruction into practice. It didn't work.
00:55:30
Speaker
And you sort of document that. You'd you'd say to yourself, OK, well, that wasn't exactly correct. Next time what I'll do is after every time that he says something, I'll pause for 10 seconds before responding. So I won't have a preset script. I'll just have a technique in mind to calm myself down before I respond to anything that this person says.
00:55:53
Speaker
That would be research and investigation. Always, you know, workshopping your daily interactions with people or whatever it is that tends to steer you away from the principles of your school. You try to workshop it so that you can actually to develop some work arounds so you don't fall into some bad habit that you're trying to break.
00:56:13
Speaker
Finally, there is something called training. Training is essentially something that only some schools focused on because for some schools, you needed kind of you know to build up your nerve a little bit. And so what this meant is that you would engage in both mental and sometimes physical toughness training.
00:56:36
Speaker
And so what this might mean is that you would deliberately put yourself into uncomfortable situations, cold showers, being out in the cold without a jacket, um rolling around in the hot sand. That was something that they did because they wanted to just get used to.
00:56:54
Speaker
willingly putting themselves through tough things. Again, these likely evolved over time. And we have good evidence of this because in the same school, we would see that an early practitioner of you know this particular way of life would only have a certain set of practices in mind, but then a later person would have a few more. And so we know that no one sat down at some point and wrote these out.
00:57:21
Speaker
These were just a product of cultural evolution over time. And so by the time that we get to someone like Marcus Aurelius in the second century CE, a couple of hundred years after Plato, it's pretty well understood that there's all these different practices that he has in mind when he's writing out his meditations. And if you know about them, you can recognize them.
00:58:04
Speaker
So, if it's understood that all these different practices evolved over time, let's go back to Plato's day. What would you, as a new member of the Academy, be learning to do? Ethically speaking, that is. What seems that, above all, the focus was on gaining self-mastery. In other words, the whole goal was to control your emotions, your passions. For the Platonists, virtue was simply having a well-ordered soul where the rational part of the soul governs everything else. In other words, if you want to be a virtuous person, you are fully in control of your emotions and you only act upon principle. You only act according to what reason dictates.
00:59:02
Speaker
We do have an allegory coming from Plato, one of his dialogues called Phaedrus, and we typically refer to it as the allegory of the chariot. In this allegory, there are two horses that are pulling the chariot. There is a noble horse and that's supposed to be associated with our higher aspirations.
00:59:22
Speaker
And there is a horse that's a bit unruly. And that's supposed to be our base desires, our uncontrolled emotions, you know our lust for money and sex, our resentment against someone that we don't like, that kind of thing. What one has to do is essentially become the charioteer. And of course, the charioteer is identified with reason. So we first have to labor to identify ourselves with reason.
00:59:52
Speaker
Now, I mention this because some of us actually don't always identify ourselves with reason. Some of us actually identify ourselves with our desires and with our emotions and even with our flaws sometimes.
01:00:08
Speaker
the things that we've done that were not actually what we wanted to do, actions that we've done that we regret. So just let me give you an example of that. Someone might say, I'm just naturally a sad person. Well, that would be to identify with you know your general mood.
01:00:26
Speaker
Or someone might just accept to themselves, as I'm greedy, or I'm a thief, I've stolen in the past, I'll probably steal again, or I'm a liar. This would all be to not really identify with a reason. If one only identifies with reason, then one would be not identifying with non-rational things like our emotions, like our irrational actions, that kind of thing.
01:00:52
Speaker
and So that's the first part, become the charioteer. The second part, is to make it so that the charioteer is the Lord over the two horses. Even though one of the horses is technically a good horse, right it has your higher aspirations as what it represents, it has to be the case that reason is in charge because even our higher aspirations can take us in the wrong direction sometimes. What's that saying? The road to hell is paved with good intentions.
01:01:27
Speaker
And so you have to make sure that reason is always in charge. Surely it should be in charge of the unruly horse, your uncontrolled emotions, but even of the noble horse, reason ought to be Lord.
01:01:41
Speaker
As you can plainly see, Plato's ethics are quite demanding. It is maybe you know not surprising then that his curriculum for becoming a philosopher king is 50 years, right? And it requires a complete turning away from the material world. You have to essentially only care about whatever reason finds it important to care about, which tends to be you know those things that are eternal, the forms, those things that will always be true, not silly little things like gossip or sports.
Virtue and Happiness in Philosophy
01:02:21
Speaker
In fact, this is so demanding that I sort of think this is why Plato felt he had to bring in metempsychosis into his worldview. If you recall, Plato believes in reincarnation. That's just another word for metempsychosis.
01:02:40
Speaker
and other thinkers in the history of philosophy have felt the need to add this sort of eternal opportunity to do the right thing as part of their worldview because they didn't see how else we could motivate ourselves to do the hard work that it takes to become a virtuous person.
01:02:58
Speaker
I'm thinking here of Immanuel Kant, but without even getting into that, perhaps Plato really didn't think that you can pull this off, become a virtuous person in one lifetime. It just didn't seem reasonable to him. It just seemed way too difficult. And so maybe that's why he thought to himself, you know, I think we need several lifetimes, a longer period of time than just a regular human lifetime to get there.
01:03:25
Speaker
And so that's why in dialogues like the Timaeus and the laws, Plato presents reincarnation as the method by which the perfect ordering of the cosmos is ensured. We all need several attempts at life. And so through reincarnation, we'll eventually get it right.
01:03:47
Speaker
As you probably recall, this idea of reincarnation actually comes from the Pythagorean Brotherhood and Plato was, in the very least, affiliated with some of the members of the Brotherhood.
01:04:01
Speaker
But it turns out that this is not the only resemblance that Plato has to another philosophical school. Plato's ethics actually prefigured Stoic ethics in a few different ways. Stoicism, by the way, would not happen until after Plato's death. And so it's very likely the case that The Stoics were influenced both by Plato and by Socrates. So here are two things that both Plato and the Stoics agree on. They both think that virtue is sufficient for happiness. What does that mean? Well, essentially, you don't need wealth to be happy. You don't need fame to be happy. You don't need to hold political office. You don't need to even look very good.
01:04:53
Speaker
None of that is necessary. All you need to be happy is to be virtuous, to have achieved this status of a philosopher where reason is in charge and you act only based on principle with the emotions being completely cast aside. Sure, you are aware of your emotions,
01:05:18
Speaker
but you're not in the grip of them. And so according to Plato, that's enough for being happy. If you get to that place, you will be happy. The Stoics believed the same thing, although for the Stoics, what virtue was was a little bit different. We'll talk about them in a much later lesson. Instead, now let me touch on the second thing that Plato and the Stoics agree on. Plato, as well as the Stoics, argued that the virtuous person cannot be harmed.
01:05:46
Speaker
In other words, if you are virtuous you can suffer no evil. Maybe a good way to understand this is to look at the example of Socrates. Socrates was of course condemned to death. He drank the hemlock willingly. He refused to break the law and escape. Does that mean that Socrates was harmed? Well, according to Plato and the Stoics, no. The only harm that could come to Socrates is if he deviated from his principles.
01:06:17
Speaker
but Socrates never deviated from his principles, at least not in that moment. right He did what he thought was right, and for that reason, he suffered no harm. In fact, at the end of his life, if you believe Plato's dialogues, Socrates was almost elated. right He was finally going to be free from the body. His soul would be unchained from the material world. and so By remaining true to his principles, Socrates remained unharmed.
01:06:47
Speaker
You could perhaps say that unwanted things happen to Socrates, but it is not real harm. The only real evil is to violate your own principles. Clearly, it seems like the philosopher is a very different person. And here I'm speaking of philosopher in the way that Plato thinks of him or her. And so let's talk about what the philosopher is like. Like, what's the goal? What are we getting at here?
01:07:15
Speaker
What are we going to be like if we follow Plato's ethics? So here I have a quote from Julia Onnes from her book, Platonic Ethics, and it's going to give you the feel for how different the philosopher is. Quote, the philosopher is completely unworldly.
01:07:36
Speaker
He doesn't know the way to the Agora, the marketplace, or the law courts. He is oblivious to laws, to political struggles, and to personalities which fascinate others. He's not even aware of what he is missing. It is only his body which lives and sleeps in the city, while his mind takes off and wings its way through the universe.
01:08:00
Speaker
Basically, the conventional life that we all live just doesn't matter to the philosopher. So I will give you an example of this and it's going to show you how weird I kind of am.
01:08:13
Speaker
So one weekend, my partner and I were a little frustrated because we didn't get to do the grocery shopping as early as we like. We like to get in there right when the store opens, you know, no crowds, ah no waiting in long lines and just get out of there. But we missed that window. And so we were there around 1 p.m. and we were thinking to ourselves, this is going to suck.
01:08:34
Speaker
I don't want to do this. Maybe let's just, you know, get groceries tomorrow. But, you know, we had to get them. So we park and there was essentially a lot of parking and we go in and the store is empty and we're just confused. And so we grabbed all the things we were going to buy and we go to the cashier and they say, oh, you you made it in before the big game.
01:08:58
Speaker
and we were a bit confused. And then I finally noticed all the little decorations that were in the store. Lo and behold, they were all football decorations. And so without our knowing, both my partner and I, we went shopping on Super Bowl Sunday and had no idea that it was Super Bowl Sunday. She, like me, just didn't even pay attention to that. And people know we don't pay attention to that, and so they don't invite us to you know any kind of football parties. And so we were completely oblivious
01:09:37
Speaker
That's a little bit how the philosopher ends up being after Plato's curriculum, maybe after several lifetimes, but not only about football, but about everything. Anything that has to do with this worldly realm, the material world, it just doesn't matter for the philosopher.
01:09:56
Speaker
I use this sports example because as we've seen many different philosophers, Xenophany, Socrates, Aristotle, Diogenes, they all question whether being obsessed with sports is a good idea. So this is something that many philosophers have in common. But we have to look beyond just sports, you know, basically anything that doesn't have to do with higher reason doesn't matter for the philosopher. It's not just sports.
01:10:22
Speaker
Same goes with gossip. you know He mentions even politics, what's going on with the economy. These things, you know they change over time. It doesn't matter. Only focus on the eternal forms, that which can only be grasped by reason itself. So clearly, philosophers are very unconventional. Some of us might even think they're irresponsible. I mean, shouldn't you pay attention to the economy or politics?
01:10:48
Speaker
But according to Plato, we have to become like God. And by that, I mean you know just pure understanding. And that will be virtuous. right Even though it seems irresponsible from one perspective, well, you've got the wrong perspective. i mean This is a real redefinition of traditional virtues.
01:11:11
Speaker
Let's just think about this for a second. Courage for Plato is to be unaffected by those things that you know have to do with the worldly realm. Things that others might consider you know damaging or fearful. right Gossip is has been my example. so On this way of looking at things, being courageous is to just not care what people say about you because that doesn't matter. This is obviously not the regular, the standard definition of what courage is.
01:11:40
Speaker
you know Even Plato's student, Aristotle, defines courage as containing your fear in the face of death. That's conventional courage, right? It has to do with your ability to get into risky situations and you know not lose your composure. But that's not courage for Plato. So there's definitely a lot of redefinition going on here when it comes to what is good for Plato. Let's just take one other example, temperance.
01:12:08
Speaker
Temperance is a virtue in the ancient world. I think it's still considered a virtue, of course. ah Temperance is basically just self-restraint. You have an opportunity to overeat, but you don't. You're tempted to engage in an extramarital affair, but you don't, right? So you have an opportunity to do something bad, but you restrain yourself. Well, for Plato, that's not really what temperance is.
01:12:36
Speaker
Temperance is turning towards the intellect, such that worldly desires go utterly unacknowledged. So for Plato, being really temperate is only thinking about the forms and not even acknowledging your carnal temptations, right? There might be an attractive person there, don't even notice. There might be a chance to steal some money, don't even notice. That's temperance for Plato.
01:13:06
Speaker
I mean, we could say a couple of things about that. I mean, first of all, if you don't even notice a temptation, is it really a temptation? So maybe you can push back on Plato there. But Plato would just respond with, you just don't get it yet. You have not yet abandoned, he might say, the material world. You're so stuck on this.
01:13:27
Speaker
But really, you have to look beyond the material world. There is another realm of existence that is way more important, way more beautiful than anything you can find here. There is Plato's mystical way of thinking, cropping up again. And here's a quick little sidebar.
01:13:45
Speaker
When you see Plato in this light, it really is not surprising at all that later on, a couple of centuries later, Saint Augustine would claim that Plato is the only philosopher that Christians need to take seriously. Just look at the language, right? Become like God.
01:14:01
Speaker
This realm doesn't matter, only you look at the world beyond. The language just fits right in with the Christian worldview. Never mind that Plato didn't mean it as a Christian, but the language is there. But that's just more of a you know side issue. Let's not get too deep into that. What I'd rather do now is get into the practices that Platonists probably engaged in.
01:14:28
Speaker
So remember, you are a brand new Platonist. You're joining the Academy. What kind of practices do you have to engage in? Well, I'm speculating here, but I'm guessing the most important practice for Platonists, especially early on, was probably attention. Attention would be important to several of the philosophical schools. It was central to the Stoics. The philosopher Pierre Hadeaux describes it this way. and a continuous vigilance and presence of mind, self-consciousness which never sleeps, and a constant attention of the Spirit." So this is a quite intense form of attention so that you're never lost in thought. You know that happens to us, or at least it happens to me,
01:15:19
Speaker
more than I even want to acknowledge. I might get lost in thought every minute of every day. You never notice how often you get lost in thought until you try to meditate for a little bit.
01:15:37
Speaker
I did do once a weekend, sort of a workshop or retreat, if you want to call it that, on Zen meditation. And I noticed that, you know, all you have to do is track your breathing, right? Pay attention to the in-breath and the out-breath and the way that I was taught. When you're breathing in, you count one. And when you're breathing out, you count two. And you try to get to 10 and then you start all over again.
01:16:06
Speaker
Well, I couldn't even get to 10 without losing track of my breathing. I would get a memory. Maybe I would think to myself, I have to make sure I do this thing when I get back home. Or I would get some, you know, self congratulatory thought. I would say, oh, it's really cool that I'm doing this.
01:16:26
Speaker
You know, I really to take my job seriously. I was doing it as research for my philosophy of religion course for the record. So there I was patting myself on the back that I was being such a good teacher when I was trying to count my breaths. Or sometimes I would kind of zone out and I would count to like 40.
01:16:46
Speaker
Well, I was lost in thought there again. I wasn't really counting the breath. I was just counting with no goal in mind. No, not remembering that when I got to 10, I was supposed to start all over again. And so when you go through that kind of experience and you realize that there's all these thoughts always really kind of getting in the way of what's right in front of you,
01:17:09
Speaker
Then you realize how important developing your attention really is. i mean In a way, it's sort of all you have. right What you choose to pay attention to is perhaps the most important thing you can decide. and Many of us don't have attentional autonomy.
01:17:27
Speaker
We compulsively check our cell phones. Every time there's a new notification, we drop whatever we're doing and we get to that. And so that is not having attentional autonomy. That is being at the beck and call of whatever impulse or desire you get. So even without being a Platonist, you might think to yourself, I think I should develop attentional autonomy. And I think I do advocate that anyone try to work on this a little bit And attention practice doesn't have to be meditation. There's all sorts of attention practice you can engage in. Essentially, doing any task that requires peak focus should do the trick. If you are learning a new instrument like the piano or learning a new skill like, I don't know, working on your golf swing or whatever, anything that makes you pay attention to the here and now, that is technically attention training.
01:18:24
Speaker
The Stoics, by the way, advocated the study of logic for this. If you don't know what logic is, it is essentially a little bit like math with words. It is a mathematical discipline that teaches you methods for assessing the validity of arguments, seeing whether they're valid or not. All of these are you know some form of attention training.
01:18:49
Speaker
And the reason why attention was important to Plato is because attention to the present moment frees you from the passions. right Your emotions, they're stirred on by either what happened in the past or anxiety over what will happen in the future. so Let's talk about this real quick. Sometimes you get you know memories or thoughts that have to do with the past and they preoccupy you in many cases.
01:19:22
Speaker
You know, I feel like I rehearse what I should have said a lot. Sometimes someone will say something to me and I don't have anything you know particularly intelligent or helpful to say at the time. And later on, I think to myself, oh, I should have said this. That would have probably helped them out a little bit. too And these aren't necessarily you know negative events. Sometimes a student will ask me a question and I don't yet have the right answer. And so I feel that I didn't do a great job. And so these are the things that preoccupy my mind. Sometimes, though, and this probably is the case with a lot of us, we keep coming back to things that were a little you know negative. So maybe someone had
01:20:04
Speaker
some words with us and they were a little offensive. And we think to ourselves, I should have said that. And days after the fact, years after the fact, maybe some people are still thinking, I should have said that. Well, just think about what this is. This is your memory of past events messing with your emotions in the moment.
01:20:26
Speaker
Why would you let yourself get upset over for something that happened a day, a week, a month, a year ago? Does it help you in this very moment to think about that? Or does it just disturb your equanimity, your peace of mind? Or what about anxiety over the future?
01:20:45
Speaker
You could just worry, but is that really gonna help you plan well for the future? We know well from psychologists that anxiety doesn't help you do anything better.
01:20:58
Speaker
Even those who say that they work better under pressure, they would have produced something even better than that without anxiety. Ideally, if you're going to plan for the future, you need to do so when you're level-headed, you're cool as a cucumber, not when you're full of anxiety. You're going to make errors in judgment if you're full of anxiety.
01:21:21
Speaker
And so by paying attention to the present moment, you're clearing the air of the past and the future and the emotions that they invoke. Remember, the past isn't in your hands and the future isn't really in your hands either. You can prepare for the future, sure, but emotion often doesn't help in that regard. Rationality helps. So to free yourself from the past and the future, what you should do is focus on the now. Mentally rehearse what you're going to do in the future, sure, but don't be captured by the future.
01:22:01
Speaker
Don't let it own you. And the way to do that is through attention. It's pretty clear why you as a new Platonist would try to extend your attentional autonomy, your capacity for focus. You want to be able to conceive of the rational organization of the cosmos. That's the whole goal of being a philosopher.
01:22:27
Speaker
You need to get that God's eye point of view. You want to ponder how the forms, the world of being with a capital B, is a template from which the world of becoming arises. And this requires peak focus. Just understanding the view requires peak focus. If you didn't have peak focus when I was explaining these things,
01:22:53
Speaker
then it might have just gone straight over your head. So just understanding the view itself requires big focus. Imagine trying to see a reality through that lens. That is definitely going to require some attentional autonomy. Now imagine trying to live like that day in and day out. Well, that's going to require even greater feats of concentration.
01:23:20
Speaker
So as a budding Platonist, maybe what you want to try to do this week is engage in some kind of attention practice. If you want to do some mindfulness meditation, go ahead. Or maybe try learning a new skill, one that requires peak focus, maybe an instrument or a new physical activity, maybe a new game chess or Chinese go.
01:23:49
Speaker
or maybe even some logic. Why not? Because you're going to need that to be a Platonist. Before I summarize Plato's ethics one last time, let me also mention that, of course, if you are a member of the Academy, general learning also matters. It's not that you're just you know engaging in attention practices all the time.
Legacy of Plato's Academy
01:24:13
Speaker
Of course, mathematics was very important to Plato, but they also covered several disciplines, biology, physics, what have you. And so clearly, just learning in general was important to the Platonist.
01:24:28
Speaker
Nonetheless, the ultimate goal, the key, is to turn thought away from all that is material and thus mortal and turn instead toward the activity of the intellect, a condition where reason governs everything else. That is how one becomes like God. And this, of course, will require extreme feats of concentration.
01:24:56
Speaker
And so you have to get in your attention practices. And so I'll leave you there in Plato's Academy as you attempt to develop some attentional autonomy. I will close by saying this about the role of Plato for Athens and for history.
01:25:16
Speaker
By the end of Plato's life, Athenians saw themselves more as a center of cultural innovation than as a military city-state. They saw themselves as a cultural empire instead of a naval empire. And it's also the case that by the end of Plato's life, philosophy as a movement was catching on.
01:25:40
Speaker
This is in no small part thanks to Plato. During his lifetime, he was the most famous of the philosophers. And you can see this in his legacy, the Academy. The Academy continued to function into the 80s BCE. That is a time of the First Mithridatic War, which is when the Roman general Sulla laid his siege on Athens. Around that time period, the last scholar, Cephalo, fled Athens and there was no error. So that's when the school stopped functioning. But all in all, the school was open for about 300 years.
01:26:19
Speaker
That's longer than all but two American universities. I went to go look it up and it looks like only Harvard and Yale haven't opened longer than Plato's Academy. So we can see here that Plato was a pivotal figure in the history of philosophy. Even those of us who disagree with them, we're doing philosophy on Plato's terms, often dealing with issues that he thought were important.
01:26:46
Speaker
And so for centuries, even after the Academy closed, people engaged with and wrote about Plato's work. Those that were his followers continued to attempt their best to follow the path, the way of life that Plato had laid out. One final thing that I'll mention here is that this whole time we've been calling him Plato,
01:27:14
Speaker
which was, of course, very likely his name. But as a new student to the Academy, this might not be how you would refer to him. Sure, maybe in regular conversation, you would call him Plato, but when they were in a more reverential mood, they probably referred to him as the Master.